


Only about the past

by Mendax



Category: The Magnificent Seven (TV)
Genre: M/M, Masturbation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-24
Updated: 2014-08-24
Packaged: 2018-02-14 11:23:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,326
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2189844
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mendax/pseuds/Mendax
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ezra remembers, because he can't imagine</p>
            </blockquote>





	Only about the past

**Author's Note:**

  * For [JoJo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/JoJo/gifts).



Ezra came silently, eyes screwed shut and throat aching with a held-back shout or groan or even whimper, he hardly knew. The long sigh after, though, he allowed to escape. His eyes drifted open to the hazy afternoon light that filtered through his curtains. A terrible indulgence, this. Naked and sweating into his blankets, belly spattered with his release and all the sounds of the busy day outside his window.

He should move, he knew. Reach for the wet cloth in the basin on his nightstand, dress and return to the day before anyone thought to miss him. But the hum of activity felt as distant as a dream, and the dream still clung so close his lips tingled with it, so he brushed his fingers across them and closed his eyes again.

It had been Chris Larabee, of course, who’d driven him up here, blood thrumming in his veins and desire trampling rationality. But when he’d brought himself off, it had been Jack. Memories as faded and worn by touch as his favorite deck of cards. Not imaginings of things that would never be, too outlandish to maintain, but Jack, as he’d been when Ezra had known him, nearly two years his senior but still a boy for all that. Blue eyes and unruly black hair, coltish limbs just starting to come into their muscle, and full lips that were always in motion, wicked and mocking by turns.

When it came to this kind of indulgence, it was always Jack. Ezra’s first had been a woman, not long after the vague notion had begun to appeal in earnest. He remembers very little of it but the churning, sickening mix of excitement and rank humiliation — a professional, arranged and paid for by his mother. 

“You’re certainly handsome enough, and you could charm the devil himself, much less the storekeep’s daughter,” Maude had told him, “but remember, a lady for the evening is far less expensive than the growing belly of a woman wooed, and less of a distraction too.”

Maude had somehow known about Jack — of course she had — within a day of her arrival to Uncle Harlan and Aunt Meg’s. Ezra hadn’t known why she’d seemed angry or why she was in such a hurry to take him and be on her way, but he’d been near wild with the unfairness of it, with the need to see Jack before they left. It wasn’t until he’d begged leave to wish his friend goodbye and his mother slapped him, hard and full across the face, for the first time ever, that he understood. 

For three days, she acted as if nothing had happened, and for two nights Ezra thought about taking their horse and riding back, finding Jack and going ... somewhere. West, maybe, or maybe to a ship and all the way to Europe. On the third night, she knocked on his door at the hotel (she’d done well while she was away, and Ezra had had his own room every night in which to make angry filigree plans and nurse his first broken heart). She’d sat beside him on the bed with his hand between her own, and storied it all away: Boys would be boys, and young men were liable to try all sorts of things between themselves, but the time for that was passed. There were names for men who acted on those impulses of youth, and punishments for their crime that didn’t bear speaking. Ezra was a man now, and it was time to leave boyhood behind.

He could not recall the words. It had been the fear in her voice — the real, honest, unfeigned fear, for _him_ — that he remembered. That fear, he knew with a surety that astonished him … that fear was love.

There had been no other Jacks, any more than there were other paid ladies of the evening. 

Not that there weren’t reminders. Young men with sable hair or devilish smiles. In the larger cities and port towns, effeminate men who rouged their cheeks and eyed him openly, brazenly, full of promise. Ezra was never certain which he found more disquieting. 

He still dreamed, still hoarded his memories. But he grew and aged, and Jack never did. What he acknowledged to himself was bad enough, but there was worse. He dreaded that his memories of Jack’s boyish charms might mean something else about him. And he certainly felt nothing but revulsion for those others, courtesans in men’s bodies, needful and trapped in dark corners, fearful … but seeing something in him to make them bold. 

So he’d left it all behind as much as he was able. There was, instead, the titillation of a moneyed room. The thrill of the con and of a game well played. The satiation of cash, the voluptuous gleam of gold. The endless challenge of the next betting hall, the next mark, the next town.

It had worked well enough until the next town was this one. Until Chris Larabee had seen something _else_ in him and given him a chance, and then, inexplicably, had given him another. Until Larabee and five other men had taken Ezra as one of their own, more or less.

Chris was nothing like Jack. Oh, his smile was wicked enough on those times he showed it, but his fine lips were as likely to press tight in anger, to curl back over his teeth in disgust, to firm up in determination or soften in remembrance and grief. Chris was something so much more. A man, and one who had lived, worn bare and honed sharp by it in equal measure. There was nothing in him that was youthful and soft, nothing painted and feminine, and the jolt of pure lust Ezra felt in his presence was as much a relief as a torment.

It was worse than that though. It didn’t take long for Ezra to realize that as much as Chris was easy to want — and Ezra knew all about wanting, didn’t he? — he was also a man it would be easy to love. He saw it everywhere he looked. From Buck’s lifelong devotion to the way the outsider Vin fit at Chris’s side. From Orrin Travis’s trust to his daughter’s romantic fancy. And in himself ... well. 

His mother had, perhaps, been right to fear, if not for the reasons she’d thought.

But Ezra knew he was in no danger of that sort. Chris’s heart had died with his wife and child, and his appetites were slaked with smart, sharp-eyed working girls who ought to know the way of things. 

Only they seemed to love him too.

It helped, in a way. It made it easier to know that there was nothing in it those times Chris’s dark eyes met his own and something wild and dangerous seemed to flare up between them. Or the way, when it was just the two of them, Chris’s voice sometimes dropped low in a way that spoke of intimacies and heated skin. That was just the effect Chris had on people, and it was Ezra’s damned misfortune that he wanted it to mean something different.

He wished he could bring those moments here, into this illicit moment of gauzy daylight and sweated sheets. But while nearly all of his earthly fantasies started with Chris Larabee these days, they fell apart as soon as Ezra joined the picture himself. 

Jack had been a revelation, and Ezra had turned him into a warning, into something to fear. Now, though, he was something of a safe harbor — the trusted friend who lived only in Ezra’s mind, regardless of who or where the real Jack may have ended up.

He had a new thought, then, and he turned it over a few times before accepting it with a lazy smile: Ezra hoped he might be the same, somewhere, in the imaginings of that man who had once been the dark-haired boy he’d first loved.


End file.
